Laura Delano Houghteling’s words tinkled like the ice in the cut glass tumblers at that Washington dinner in the spring of 1939: “Twenty thousand charming children were all too soon to grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.” The table had been discussing a legislative proposal introduced after the horrors of Kristallnacht to grant refugee status to Jewish children escaping Nazi-ruled Germany. Like so many others, diplomat Jay Pierrepont Moffat recorded that night in his private journal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s elegant cousin didn’t want America to be in the compassion business.
This anniversary of the 9/11 attacks comes at a time when one of its most tragic impacts is becoming increasingly evident. Fearful of a violent, often-hostile world, leeched of the optimism that shaped public culture after the Second World War, large swatches of the West are downing shutters on immigration. Across Europe and North America, nativist movements seeking to paint nations White again are gathering momentum.
Following the end of the Second World War, mass immigration—introduced to help the war-torn West address its needs for labour to reconstruct—built the multi-ethnic societies that powered an unprecedented period of global prosperity and intellectual progress. That era could prove to be one of the things Osama Bin Laden’s jihadists demolished.
The rebuilding of the world
Less than a week before our world was transformed by the images of the burning Twin Towers, President George W Bush and his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox hammered out the contours of a deal that could have laid the order for a new immigration order for a globalised world. Millions of undocumented immigrants already in the US would be granted legal status, and a new work permit system would be put in place to make it possible to seek employment across borders legitimately. Labour from Mexico would get the income it sought—and the US would get the affordable workers needed to power its industries and farms.
For much of its existence, the US had resisted non-White immigration: Chinese labourers entering the country had been treated with ferocious hostility and then legal prohibitions, a fate later shared by Japanese, Koreans, and South Asians. Even European immigrants—especially Jews—were accepted grudgingly, scholar Julia Young reminds us. The reforms of 2001 were genuinely revolutionary.
Then, the events of 9/11 changed the debate: The attackers had used visas and passports to enter the US, and the country now seemed just too vulnerable to predators from the world beyond the fences. The emphasis turned to how borders could be better sealed off, not regulated.
As the former immigration czar Marc Rosenblum notes, this marked a turning away from the pragmatism that had long characterised US immigration policy. “The United States immigration system tolerated a high degree of illegality,” he noted, “and tacitly permitted widespread illegal employment in agriculture and other low-skills sectors of the economy.”
Legislative efforts to bar employers from hiring illegal workers failed to make their way through Congress from the 1950s into the 1970s, Rosemblum observes, with businesses lobbying for stable sources of low-cost labour.
Things weren’t that different elsewhere in the West. Following the Second World War, the United Kingdom reversed decades of effort to restrict non-White immigrants and began importing labour from across its former empire. Even though institutionalised racism and White backlash would lead to growing violence within two decades, the UK’s cultural and racial landscape was radically transfigured.
France, for its part, drew on labour from northern Africa. Germany turned to Turkey. Few countries had fully understood the long-term implications of their decisions: Germany, for example, only realised that it would need to unite long-term workers with their families in the 1960s, and the UK danced around questions over the citizenship of workers from the Caribbean, leading to a series of scandals.
The long period of prosperity that began after the end of the Second World War war, though, was slowing by 9/11. Through the 1980s, scholar Jim Tomlinson has noted, deindustrialisation and economic inequality had become increasingly prominent features of major Western economies. Efforts to prepare the working class for the profound changes they encountered were, at best, anaemic. The conditions had been created for White identity politics to acquire an increasing role in public life.
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The making of the White Wall
Evidence of the deep conflicts over immigration isn’t hard to find in the West. Faced with growing resentment from working-class whites, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is considering means to cut back visas for foreign temporary workers. The country is estimated to need half a million migrants a year to keep its economy growing, and its path-breaking points-based system was once marketed as a model for how countries could attract the kinds of young, skilled workers that were needed.
Faced with rising crime levels in once-model immigrant neighbourhoods like Brampton, small armies of low-skill students at spurious institutions, and chronic housing shortages in major cities, some Canadians are beginning to question the model, journalist Michael Cuenco observes.
Electoral success for the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, might mean less than headlines invoking the Nazis suggest—Thuringia and Saxony are both tiny provinces—it is no secret that deep cultural strains have divided society. France has seen dramatic changes in its policy frameworks for immigrants, with the Right-wing Rassemblement National pushing for far-reaching changes in the terms of citizenship.
Former US President Donald Trump’s Mexico Wall might have done little to deter cartels from trafficking immigrants across the border, but he’s provided a voice for white resentment against the transformation of their country. Even though the evidence suggests there is no crime wave linked to immigrants, it has become a widely-held belief, scholars Brianna Seid, Rosemary Nidiry and Ram Subramanian note.
Eleven million residents of the US are thought to be illegal immigrants, and in 2023, a record 2.5 million more were interdicted trying to cross into the country. Even though polls suggest Americans still see immigration as a net good, some feel threatened by a demographic landscape where over a third of the population consists of immigrants and their children.
For the jihadists who executed 9/11, the ending of this globalisation of peoples and cultures might prove one, final victory.
A victory for jihadism?
Late in 1949, the Islamist ideologue Sayyed Qutb—al-Qaeda’s primary intellectual progenitor—arrived in the United States. “The world was pouring into New York because that was where the power was, and the money, and the transforming cultural energy,” Lawrence Wright has written. Irish, Russians, Germans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Chinese had all made the city home; the population of refugees from America’s own racism, blacks from the south, had doubled in just the previous eight years. The country held half the world’s wealth.
To Qutb, though, this prosperity was built on a moral morass. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote in language suffused with sexual anxiety and neurosis. “She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs.”
Even jazz failed to meet Qutb’s civilisational criteria: “The American is primitive in his artistic tastes, whether in his judgment of art or his own artistic works. Jazz music is his music of choice. It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”
The al-Qaeda attacked a world in which boundaries—maintained for centuries by the word of God and the fear of violence—were being dismantled. Through insurgencies from Egypt and Algeria to Afghanistan, it has fought against the condition of modernism, using violence to prevent assertions of rights by women, ethnic minorities and intellectuals. To al-Qaeda, late-capitalist America was the fountainhead of its true enemy, modernism.
The dismal monoculture that white nationalism is seeking to rebuild concedes victory to the jihadist project.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)